licensing socket and instances in same server

[ikbarbero]

Hi,

We upgraded our servers to v10 a few days ago and we have a issue with licensing. In our environment we have per socket and per instance licensed, until now we got it in separate V&R servers but as the new version allow to use it in the same deployment we would like to unified it. The problem here is that it looks like that by default it V&B uses socket licensing and we didn't find a way to attach socket licenses to cluster. Is there any way to do it?

Also, using Enterprise Manager, is there anyway to attach it o specific server or it's necessary to disable license autoupdate from EM and manage it server by server?

Thanks

[Mildur]

If there is a socket license present, then all virtual workload will need a socket license.
You can‘t use socket license for esxi 1-4 and instance license for esxi 5-8 on the same veeam backup server. Veeam will try to use always socket license in this scenario.

[veremin]

Mildur is correct here, in the presence of socket license all virtual workloads will be processed via it. Instances will be used for everything else.

You can refer to What's New document to find more about this behavior:

Socket Licenses
• Mandatory socket license usage for VM protection: In presence of a Socket license, protecting vSphere or
Hyper-V VMs with agents or enterprise application plug-ins requires and consumes a socket license. This is
the existing Veeam licensing policy that is now enforced at the product level. To avoid backup interruption
after v10 upgrade, please ensure your socket license is sufficient to cover all hypervisor hosts where
protected VMs reside, no matter of which Veeam product is used for protecting those VMs.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

disable license autoupdate from EM and manage it server by server?

Please note that it is against Veeam licensing policy to protect different parts of the same vSphere infrastructure with difference licenses. See the Licensing section of the sticky FAQ topic.

Our recommendation is to ensure you have enough Sockets licensed to cover all your VM protection needs. Alternatively, you can convert your socket licenses to VUL - currently, this conversion can be done at no extra costs and we will match the required number of VMs for the entire environment regardless of your VMs per socket density.

[jamcool]

So if I read this write, even if I install Windows agent on a VM and back it just I do my physical servers via a protection group, it will find that VM's Host it resides on and assign it a socket license instead of using an instance license like it did in version 9.5? I have 4 VMs in a 50 node cluster that I want to backup but I do not want to backup the rest of the 1,000 VMs in that cluster as they are self generating each day. I was using Windows agent and it consumed instance license. It consumed the 6 instances (1.5 per server under 9.5). Now the job is failing and I see 2 of the 4 using instance but I see one of the VM Host getting a license and it is complaining about not enough socket licenses.

[Mildur]

If you add the hypervisor as a host in Veeam, then agent backups will try to use socket license if your license is socked based.
If you install veeam agent on a vm, where the host is not added as a hypervisor, veeam will consume an instance for this agent.

[jamcool]

I was trying to think of some fancy reply but all I can say is "Yuck". . What is weird is that 2 of the 4 VMs that are running Windows agents are working just fine and consume 2 instance licenses. The other 2 are grabbing socket licenses which I do not have extra.

[Gostev]

Can you clarify why are you backing up some VMs with agent-based backup jobs in the first place, as opposed to host-based backup jobs? Because it makes no technical sense to backup standard VMs using agents. Agent-based backups has always been considered a bad practice for virtual environments, and this is exactly what made Veeam so popular with our host-based backups.

[jamcool]

We have two scenarios where we were using windows agent backup instead of host based.

one is for Microsoft SQL Alwayson cluster servers that cannot tolerate snapshots that cause cluster to have issues such as trying to fail back but cannot. Since these servers are part of our host based backups using socket license, they show up in instance licensing but count as 0 not 1. This is a VMWARE issues and not a Veeam issue. I had opened case about it and was told it was a known issue with VMWARE.

Second we have a 50 host/300 VM VMWARE cluster dedicated for Citrix server provisioning (re-creates 300 VMs daily from a golden image). The Citrix provisioning system has a few VMs that handle the fucntion of deleting and re-creating the VMs that reside on the same cluster. We just wanted to backup the few VMs and not socket license the entire cluster since not backing up the all Citrix provisioned VMs. Thus under 9.5 we were using 6 instance licenses (4 VMs counting as 1.5 instance each) to backup just the VMs we needed from the entire cluster. With version 10, you cannot do this anymore as it will license the host with socket license. We now isolate the few VMs to a few VM Host and socket license them.

[Akorzzar]

Hello,

A customer uses socket and instance licenses on his backup server (8 sockets and 20 instances).
Currently they are in the last phases of switching from an old Hyper-V Infrastructure to a new VMware Infrastructure, and the migration is almost completed. Currently there are only 4 more VMs on the Hyper-V Cluster, which are still protected with Veeam. We currently have the problem, that all 8 socket licenses are used for the new Infrastructure and we would like to use the instance licenses for the remaining 4 Hyper-V VMs, but the Backup Server does not consume those instance licenses and instead gives an error because of insufficient licenses.

Am I doing something wrong here or is there a deeper flaw?

Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi,

Protecting VMs with instances cannot be done if you have a socket license installed in the VBR server. Please review this thread for more details.

Thanks!

[Akorzzar]

Hi Vitaliy,

thanks for the merge and the answer to my question.

Cheers!